Istanbul

'From a very young age, I knew I was not alone: somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lived another Orhan so much like me that he could pass for my twin, even my double...' For Orhan the day-dreaming child, the heart of the great teeming city of Istanbul was the building known as 'Pamuk Apartments', where each branch of his large and extended family occupied its own separate floor.

Now the writer Orhan Pamuk, with his unique sense of history and extraordinary gift for narrative, revisits his own family's secrets and idiosyncracies, discovering what made them typical of their time and place. And as he companionably guides us through Istanbul's monuments and lost paradises, its dilapidated Ottoman villas, back streets and waterways, he introduces the writers, artists, columnists and mad popular historians who have tracked Istanbul through one hundred and fifty years of 'modernisation'. And so, in a beautiful and quite riveting fashion, Pamuk transforms the form of autobiography, and what begins as a portrait of the artist as a young man becomes a portrait of the artist as a city.